Planetary speed and stations: what counts

The calculation data give each body its speed in degrees per day, with a sign: positive when it moves forward, negative when it is retrograde. To say whether a planet is slow or fast, it has to be compared with its average speed. The classic table gives that average as seen from the Sun, and it skews everything for the distant planets: seen from Earth, Pluto's motion is dominated by the motion of Earth itself.

AstralPro therefore uses geocentric averages, calculated once and for all over a century of ephemerides: 13.18 degrees per day for the Moon, 0.99 for the Sun, 1.22 for Mercury, 0.57 for Mars, 0.0196 for Pluto (five times the classic value). It is the only way to compare ten bodies with one another.

Before turning retrograde, and again before resuming direct motion, a planet slows down until it seems motionless: this is the station. Tradition has watched it since Ptolemy, who tells the first station from the second. AstralPro reads it as a moment of weight: what the planet carries does not pass, it settles in.

AstralPro declares a planet stationary when its speed drops below 10% of its average. This applies to the eight planets from Mercury to Pluto; neither the Sun nor the Moon ever stops. Measured: 0.29 planets per chart, and a quarter of charts have at least one. Rare enough to be worth saying.

The engine also classifies planets as "slow" (under 50% of their average) or "fast" (above 150%). These states are not written: a slow planet turns up in 83% of charts, a fast one in 74%. Stating them would set no one apart. And "fast" cannot even be defined for all of them: Venus and Mars never exceed one and a half times their average.

Slowness adds little to retrogradation: a slow planet is retrograde roughly one time in two, because slowness frames the backward motion, near the two stations that bound it. The station names that moment better. Speed is also used elsewhere, without being written: it is what makes it possible to say whether an aspect is Applying or Separating, in the Direction column of your grid.

The Moon is never retrograde, and its speed varies by about 27% (from 11.77 to 15.38 degrees per day). It is the only body for which speed is the only information about motion, and tradition has always read it. So as not to bring it up in one chart out of two, AstralPro keeps only the extremes: a slow Moon at 11.88 degrees per day or less, a fast Moon at 14.67 or more. Each of these cases concerns 10% of charts.

In the prose, the words stationary, station, speed, degrees per day, slow and fast are not written: they are engine figures. The writing receives directions of meaning: the halt, the weight or the turning point for a station; retention, density, slowness to digest for a slow Moon; mobility, reactivity, difficulty settling for a fast Moon. And the state is read with the body's dignity, not beside it.

Speed is printed nowhere in your tables: neither the positions table nor the aspect grid shows it. It lives in the chapter I data, after the dignity of the body concerned, and only for a station or an extreme Moon. The vast majority of charts have neither, and the report does not say that something is missing.

It does not enter the scores either. Does a stationary planet weigh more in an aspect, to the point of pushing it up in a chapter's selection? The question is legitimate, but AstralPro has not settled it yet: before adding that weight, it would need to measure what it would bring into and drop out of the selections. In the meantime, the station colours the reading of the planet without changing the order of the aspects discussed.

In the chart of Camille Morel, AstralPro's example chart (fictional data), the Moon, at 27°09' Scorpio in house 1, races along at 14.75 degrees per day, above the 14.67 threshold: it is a fast Moon. Her data describe it in one line: fall, in sect, fast Moon. Her report does not stack these three facts: it draws a single portrait of her Moon from them, where the mobility of her emotions is read together with the fall and with its role as guide of a nocturnal chart, without ever using the word "fast".

None of her planets is stationary. Her Mercury, retrograde at 6°37' Scorpio, moves backwards without being at a standstill: it therefore does not carry the weight of a station, and her report reads it only as retrograde.